Marianna, I ask your forgiveness, and the forgiveness of everyone I might have scandalized with my sins, just as I’ve asked forgiveness of merciful God … What must you have thought of me – of this abject sinner who spends her life weeping and praying at the foot of the Cross in order to purge her transgressions?
We had a special series of spiritual exercises. A very renowned preacher was called in, and speaking through him, God’s voice thundered in the semi-darkness of the church with its black-curtained windows. How dreadful the word of the Lord is! No, it was my sins, my guilty conscience, and my remorse that made it frightening. For my heart tells me that the word of God cannot but resonate with infinite love and mercy.
How upset I was by those sermons! They instilled me with fear and terror. God seemed cruel. I saw the blast of His divine anger strike from above the altar, I heard a snarling of demons that was lost in the dome, and I saw the black wings of bats etched against the shadows of the vaulting. God spoke of hell, and of the damned … and all night long I thought I heard the lamentations of the souls in torment, weeping and wailing in the next world … And I was filled with dread, of myself and my sin.
Now I feel completely deranged … my heart tries in vain to take refuge in the thought of divine mercy … My sin is monstrous. Can I ever be forgiven? The preacher wasn’t clear about that – he listed every transgression, threatening divine retribution against all the most wicked sins, but he dared not even include mine among them. His mind must have shunned the enormity of it!
Good God, what’s become of me? Perhaps I’ve even forfeited the right to invoke you! A depraved sinner, condemned to suffer your anger, can I still listen to your word? Can I still prostrate myself at your feet among these virgins that are your chosen?
Marianna, it’s dreadful to be abandoned even by the Lord! Yet there are times when temptation tells me that I’m innocent, that I’m blameless of my sin, that God might forgive me … Why am I lost? What have I done?
It’s the devil that suggests these doubts to me, and it’s the devil that possesses me!
I consider myself damned. I’m filled with fear and loathing of myself, with remorse and terror. Yet I still love my God, and I wish I could unburden my soul of its immense anguish at the foot of the crucifix. But I can’t, I can’t … I’m damned!
The nights! If you only knew what the nights were like – when the light burns out, and the shadows waver, and the furniture creaks, and the silence is full of whisperings and indistinct sounds. They’re nights of deep terror, of sepulchral mysteries, the snarling of demons, the howls of the damned, an unholy rustling of wings. Everything’s so gloomy – that long, dark and silent corridor, the dead lying beneath our feet, that church, those lamps and pictures – grotesque figures appear on the walls, and above my bed, at the foot of the crucifix, there’s a shapeless skull … there’s the fear of the air you breathe, of a silence that conceals sinister noises, of the space around you, of the weight of the blankets on your body … I daren’t cry out because I’m afraid of awakening terrible echoes, of feeling a thousand horrible shapes settling on my flesh. Sleep is troubled, fraught with nightmares. I often wake with a cry, bathed in a cold sweat and tears.
Why was that sermon so frightening? Why is the word of God so terrible?
O Lord, have mercy even on this wretched sinner, have mercy even on this lost soul!